


Monument of a Memory

by TheElusiveBadger



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Barnes & Rogers Family Friendship, Bisexual Steve Rogers, F/M, Gen, Historians, Historians Can Get Things Wrong, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, POV Alternating, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Civil War (Marvel), World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 08:59:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5822467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes was born in Brooklyn on December 29, 1917.  He always thought he would die there, old and surrounded by family. He didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monument of a Memory

January 1918

George Barnes left the synagogue to the sounds of his eight day old son’s shrieking cries emanating from Winnie’s lap, her family and all the other guests speaking words that he couldn’t understand. The heavy rain soaked into his suit and dripped from his hair as he wandered around the foreign streets of his wife’s childhood home in Flatbush. Today was supposed to be a happy day, and it was, for his wife and her family. Perhaps even for his son, James, who wouldn’t remember today but would carry it with him for the rest of his life.

Events of the past few days played in his mind as he wandered past shoppers, busily buying last minute items for their meal tonight before sundown hit, only another hour or so away, and he sped up. His feet smacked into the puddles gathered in the drains and holes of the street, and he turned off into another block, where the dress styles changed. Here, redheaded women called out “cabbages and potatoes” from market stalls, and the signs were in letters he could read. He saw a few men from the Great War, all with that same haunted look in their eyes that George woke up to every morning. The one that spoke of death and destruction, the cloying smell of blood so thick in the lungs that one carried it around as mucus for the rest of their lives. The one that not even Winnie, left behind in Indiana alone on a base surrounded by Anglo-Saxon wives, could scrub away.

He stopped and hovered near one of the stalls, smiling at the freckled woman eying him with suspicion, taking in the _yarmulke_  on his head. He tensed, every muscle seizing under his clothes, waiting. Finally, she nodded and asked, “Cabbages? Potatoes? Five cents a pound.”

Her accent was thick and heavy, each word a testament to where she had been. George felt odd and out of place, in his perfectly pressed suit, no hint of wear or tear. When he spoke, his words came out clear and American, painted with a life lived in more prosperous areas of Manhattan. Instead of speaking, he nodded towards a rather wilted looking cabbage, and tossed the woman her fare.

Clutching his cabbage in hand, the rain still pelting down, soaking the leaves through enough that perhaps there wouldn’t even be a need for a rinse if he handed it to Winnie, he turned away from the way he came. Men and women gave him a wide berth, letting him cross the street without having to shoulder his way through the crowd. Stumbling near the turnoff was a tall, broad shouldered woman, clutching a bag filled with cabbages in her hand. Her chest was heaving up and down under her heavy black clothes, and her black veil was slipping away from her blonde hair.

“I’m alright,” she said as George moved to help her. She waved the hand not holding the bag in a dismissive manner. Her words came out short and clipped as she continued. “You don’t need to be helping me. I can help myself.” She looked him straight in the eyes and hers were as blue as the Atlantic. Her veil shifted around her nose as she moved, sheer and black. George recognized it as a mantilla, the same type of mourning garb that his mother had brought with her from Naples, that she brought out whenever someone passed. A professional mourner, his mother had been. Rosary beads clutched in her hands to beat at her breasts, tears flowing down her cheeks, “ _il mio Dio_ ,” a song from her lips, and a purse stuffed with antipasti and bread clutched by her hip.

This woman had recently lost someone. His eyes flicked towards her slightly rounded stomach, smaller than Winnie had been with James, before she’d become bedridden and desperate to go home to Brooklyn for the birth. The scar that wound itself like a rope around his right leg, trapping him into a permanent limp, twinged in sympathy. The father, no doubt, probably a casualty of the war that had chewed George up and spit him out.

“Just making sure you don’t fall, Ma’am. I wouldn’t want all of your cabbages to go rolling down the drain. They’re sad enough as it is,” George told her as he continued to hover, making sure that she didn’t trip and fall on her face. The woman let out a sharp laugh.

The sun was setting. Winnie would no doubt be wondering where he was. They would be back from the synagogue now, the dining table prepped and ready, the bread under his mother-in-law’s beloved cloth brought with her from Budapest when his wife was just a babe. Winnie would be dressed in her best clothes, hovering over the candles, looking out the window, and wondering where he was. The same solo that his wife had been playing for months, even after he’d come back from the war, sitting by the door at night and waiting for him to come home stumbling and wrecked, reeking of whisky and piss. Her eyes getting sadder and more distant every day, far from the smiling, happy girl he’d swept away from pianos and orchestras to the farms and fields of the Midwest.

He swept his hand through his russet curls, pushing the _yarmulke_ further back on his skull. The cabbage under his arm felt like a lead ball. He could hand it over to the woman, whose collarbones were bayonets under her skin, top buttons of her dress come undone in her struggle. Hand off his burden and meander down past the looming cathedral with its clanging church bells, through the rainwater that probably smelled like the Éire, bitter and familiar, to the market sellers and people who lived on this block, and into the first bar for the strongest pint of guinness he could imbibe.

“Sa—,” she began to say, and the syllables came out like _sear_ before she stopped, clearing her throat. She straightened up fully, hand curved on her belly and continued. “Sarah Rogers. And you?”

Private, he thought. Father, his mouth almost said. George Barnes was what spilled out of his mouth instead.

“Well Mr. Barnes,” she said and she was smiling now, brittle and sarcastic and refreshing. Eyes scanning the stars in the sky, she said, “Best be on your way home now. Dark and all. Good…. _shabbe_ , is it? I can never remember. Too many words get mixed in my head around here.”

“ _Shabbos_ ,” he told her, correcting her pronunciation before he realized it. His breath caught in his throat and his stomach twisted as he shook his head, continuing, “I’m not—I mean—my wife and…” he stopped, eyes resting on her belly, breathing in. He saw his father, another George, but stooped and antiquated. His teeth yellowed by tobacco and gin, comfortable in the large house that stock market gambling had borne, glaring at George and Winnie with fire and brimstone sprouting from his voice. Venom striking from a God that George had lost in the green and red fields of France somewhere and never wanted back.

He carried on, shaking the image from his mind, “...my son is.” The confession was whispered, almost shrouded under the downpour and the wind. Her blue eyes lit up with understanding and she nodded her head.

“My bairn,  he won’t know his father,” she told him, like they were old friends and not two strangers mucking about soaked to their skins. She rubbed her belly and continued, “Don’t know yet if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Joe was what he was, but my son’s not going to grow up under no conqueror’s yoke.” Her lip jutted out stubbornly and there was a straight-backed cast to her stance.

George almost laughed as he remembered Rosetta Barnes attempts to wrestle him into his Sunday best, sprouting out entreaties to the Pope and all the saints. She had martyred herself in her struggles to wash the dirt off his face while his father sat, Anglican and straight-backed, shaking his head at his wife’s superstitious nonsense.

“What’s important to Winnie’s important to me,” he said to her. His eyes widened. This was the first time he had admitted it out loud. He’d cowed under his father’s condemnations, “you’re going to raise my grandson a Jew,” silent as the grave. His steps had been light and humble out of the house, grip tight on Winnie’s hand. The words lifted the anchor that had been drooping his shoulders, crushing him.

Sarah nodded and said, “That’s a good man, not giving your wife grief. Joe and me use to raise holy hell about it, when we was in Ireland, still living with his haunt of a mam. Glad to hear your wife don’t need to waste her breath.” George couldn’t help but picture her little boy, bright and bouncing, fists up in the air and shaking off the world. Growing up without a father. He thought of James, bright eyed and screaming, a healthy set of lungs and a strong kick.

The thought of him growing up without a father. George’s insides twisted harder, sharp and grounding.

The rain began to taper off, less of a downpour falling onto the top of their heads and more of a shower, stuttered and broken but enough to wash clean. Sarah inclined her head to the decrepit and stained brick building behind them, full of crowded tenements where women loitered about the stoop and children were covered in rags. Sarah coughed, her body shuddering once, then twice. She waved him off when he stepped forward in concern.

“I’m fine, boyo,” she said to him, clipped and short. Impatient, George thought, this woman was a tidal wave of impatience. She continued, “You should head home to your wife now. Unless you want to come in for a cup of tea?”

The thought of sitting down in a dirty tenement perfumed with the smell of boiled cabbage and potatoes, and tea that tasted like bilgewater, was about as appealing as a pulled tooth. He shook his head politely, and answered, “I’m gonna head home. Dinner’s probably already started and Winnie’s probably consumed all the bread. I’m telling you, with her around, no one else can get more than a crust of it.”

She nodded her head, no more words said. Patting her belly, she began to walk away, never looking back at him. He was probably already forgotten to her, no more than a footnote in her life, just like she would become in his. Turning around, he adjusted his _yarmulke_ on his head, and shouldered his way through the thinning crowd as fast as his limping gait would allow. The smell of candle wax and the sounds of songs blanketed him as he walked through the door of his parent-in-laws home, hovering in the doorway. Winnie glanced at him, relief in her eyes, with James asleep in her arms. His mother-in-law, Ruth, glared at him and said, “So you’re back? Look Alexandru, our daughter’s husband returns. ”

He held out the cabbage, a pathetic offering of sodden leaves and said, “I brought back some cabbage.”

Ruth rolled her eyes, sighed and said, “Put it down and eat.” As if nothing had ever interrupted them, Alexandru and his two sons began to sing again. George slid past them and kissed Winnie on the forehead. She smiled at him, her lips crinkled, and her brown eyes were shining.

“I never doubted you’d be back,” she told him. When he put down the cabbage, she shifted to place James into his arms. The tiny baby shuffled in his blanket and his fist rubbed against his chin when he opened looked at his father with the same blue eyes as George’s own.

~~~~~~

April 1929

Winnie sucked in a breath from the sudden sharp pain in her ribcage, clutching the countertop, her knuckles white and her hands shaking. The water was boiling for the _mămăliga_ , almost in danger of boiling _over_ , and she couldn’t get her legs to obey enough so that she could turn it off. Although the place they’d moved to on a mixed street in Flatbush was small — far smaller than anything Winnie had ever lived in before, even in Bucharest, and she had lived in small places all her life — her arm was too short to reach the knob on the oven door from where she had been sifting cornmeal.

Times had been hard since George has lost his job at the police force the year before, missing one too many Saturday shifts from imbibing too much wine the night before. The only kind of alcohol her haunted husband could get since the prohibition, and on the nights when he drank one too many Winnie would send Bucky and Becca and Abbi to bed down with her brother Daniel’s wife, Rosalie, and hold him all night, sweat sick and shaking, lost in nightmares she would never know.

When the spells would last for weeks, well, that’s what her parents were for.

He’d been good about holding down the job at the docks for the last six months since they’d moved away from her childhood home. And if it was because times were hard, and they couldn’t afford the wine he used to trap himself, well than Winnie was grateful to it for making him a better father. If his job at the docks didn’t pay nearly as well, then Ingrid, her youngest brother, Isaac’s, wife who spoke only in Yiddish or German, had promised that she’d get her a job in the shirtwaist factory when the latest babe had come.

She glanced behind herself, teeth clenched and sucking in her breath to where her son was, holding a roast up to a gigantic bruise on Steve Rogers’ face. Ever since Bucky had met the small, frail blonde with a permanent hacking wheeze and a fight-me expression, he’d been nursing one wound or another, whether that was Steve’s or his own. He and Arnie Roth had been dragging the little Irish boy with them everywhere lately, even the days when she managed to drag herself and her children out of bed to make the long walk to temple.

Steve’s mother was always gone off to work and when she wasn’t, she was passed out, exhausted and too poor to scrape together more than a few slices of bread for her son. Even though her own flour was scarce enough to last through the week, Winnie had been feeding the boy more often than not, and it seemed he slept with her son on his cot in the living room more often than he did home.

Another sharp pain, this time in her lower abdomen, shooting up her back, brought her back to reality and she let out an involuntary groan. Bucky’s eyes instantly shot away from Steve’s face and Becca stopped practicing the dusty piano in the corner to look, worried, at their mother. Even Steve Rogers had stopped ranting about whatever bully he’d run into that day and was staring at her with concern.

“Mama, what’s happening?” Bucky asked. Only eleven, he stood four inches taller than the boy at his side, with clear blue eyes and brown hair, his face round but more handsome than she’d ever hoped. He took after her, before life and age had caught up with her, wrinkles under her eyes, lines on her brow, and her hair a perpetual mess hidden under scarves and hats. He danced as well as she had when she’d met George, sang better than she ever could, and played the piano like a dream. Breathing through the pain, contractions, fuck, it was too early for this, and she forced herself not to panic, she thought about the last time she and George had been dancing. Five years ago, with a dress like those flappers in the papers, fringes sweeping across her thighs as she spun around the dance hall, and a feather on her head.

Back before the miscarriages. Before the night terrors, the daily trips into Manhattan to wait on his bedridden father, with Ida having taken the veil, George was left to deal with a man never grateful for compassion in his forsaken life. Back before the missed recitals and science fairs.

She sucked in a breath and tried to smile at them. Becca had gotten up from her seat at the piano and was hovering by the boys. Steve had shuffled close to the shaking girl. Thankfully, Abbi was with Ingrid, because Winnie didn’t think she could deal with four shaking children, least of all her youngest, frequently overtaken by bursts of panic and mania.

“Mama, is it the baby?” Becca, nine years old but quick as a whip, asked.

She didn’t want to answer. She forced herself to stay still and smile at the children, every muscle tense and shooting knives of pain through her body. It was too soon. Three weeks before she’d planned to go stay with her mother, knowing all of the midwives in her childhood neighborhood. Here, here she didn’t even know where the damn hospital was! George was still at the docks, not expected home till long after sundown, and she hadn’t made calls to any of the neighbors.

She was a stranger here. As strange as she’d been in Indiana, newly married and waiting on an army base too regulated, too foreign, the wives only nice too her when they were trying to save their own souls but cold and distant once they realized she knew how to take care of her own. Indiana, with its lack of trolleys and noise; its lack of a sea. Not even able to drive out to the nearest city, find a dance hall and a piano and bring herself, briefly, minutely, back home. The home she’d left with tears and words of pity laced with anger, suitcase in hand and a certificate from the county hall.

Before she could lie, the next sharp contraction made her muscles seize and she had slid down the counter onto the floor before she knew what was happening. The boys were up in an instant, Steve turning on the faucet, and Bucky kneeled in front of her, hand outstretched to push her matted hair away from her forehead. “Mama,” he said, “We need to call a doctor.”

Winnie shook her head, gasping, “Don’t have the money for the doctor. Becca, run out and go find your _bubbe_.”

Bucky growled, low in his throat and he looked more grown up than a boy his age should. Not even a man yet. He turned to Becca and then to her and said, “That will take too long.”

Winnie tried to answer but Steve had handed her the glass of water, staring at her with his piercing eyes, expecting her to drink it right then and there. Wordlessly, she gulped it down, but it did nothing much to help the fire in her loins, the babe kicking and fighting to made its way into the world.

Steve looked at Bucky and said, “My mam’s home. She was a midwife back in the Old Country. I’ll go get her.”

Winnie tried to shake her head, tell the boy it was fine, she didn’t need it, but her throat seemed to have seized up at the same time as her legs, because nothing came out. No denial. Not even a scream. Bucky was up with Steve within a few seconds, and he was out the door, tossing a command to his sister, “watch her.”

The sun was beginning to set outside and the light that had been shining through their single, solitary window in the main room was beginning to dim. Becca got up to fetch some candles and light them, placing them around the room so that the light from the fire would illuminate it.

Breaking free from the lump in her throat, Winnie smiled at her daughter, who was twisting and fiddling with the edge of her dress, watching her mother with wide eyes. Whispering, Winnie said, “You’re such a smart girl, _bubblelah_.”

Becca’s eyes were glassy with unshed tears. She’d been home the last few times that Winnie had gone through this kind of pain, huddled in corners or doorways while Winnie was down on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the blood, not able to hold back her own sobs.

Becca put her head down and said, “I can’t read as well as Bucky can. _Zeyde_ thinks he should be a Torah scholar.”

Winnie put her hand out and gestured for her daughter to come closer so that she could grab it. Becca complied. Winnie reached out with her other hand to push her daughter’s brown curls away from her face and told her, “Your _zeyde_ wants all his sons and grandsons to be Torah scholars. He’s disappointed he hasn’t gotten one yet. You, you don’t need to read well to know things. You just know them.”

Before Becca could answer her the door slammed open and a tall, thin woman in a bedraggled brown dress strode in with Bucky and Steve nipping at her heels. Her blonde hair was disheveled, strands coming out from the bun on top of her head, and there were large bags under her eyes that spoke of a bone deep weariness. She wasn’t smiling when she took in the sight of mother and daughter. Instead, she muttered, “ _As ucht Dé._ ” Turning to the boys, she began rolling up her sleeves and continued, “Bucky, help your mother to the couch. Steve, go boil up some water.”

“Becca,” Steve’s mother kept speaking, and Winnie hadn’t even realized the woman knew her daughter because this was the first time she’d ever seen Steve’s mother in the four months Bucky had been bringing him around. “I want you to sit behind your mother and stroke her back for me.”

The children quickly got to the tasks they’d been given. Winnie watched with slightly dazed eyes, concentrating on her breathing. Now that the woman was here, her mind had turned into a ostinato, thoughts about blood and tears and liquor on George’s breath hooking itself right in with the pain.

The blonde woman was kneeling in front of her now, her hands, thin with spiderweb veins, pressing down on Winnie’s stomach. She wasn’t that much older than Winnie, from what she’d been able to gather from the little Steve had mentioned of his mother. A nurse in the tuberculosis ward, widowed since the war, a suffragette, and a woman who apparently liked to spit out the communion wine. The woman said, “Still a while till the bairn is ready to come. I’m Sarah. Your name’s Winnie right?”

Winnie nodded, and Sarah smiled for the first time since she’d arrived. It was small, barely a crook of her mouth, but it began to draw Winnie away from the loop of her mind. She continued, “Bucky talks about you a lot. Mama’s boy, that one is. I’ve been wanting to ask, of all the presidents to name your son after, why that one?”

As Sarah touched her forehead, feeling for fever, Winnie answered, “He’s not. Buchanan was a friend of my husband. Saved George’s life during the war. At the cost of his own. James, well, I just liked the name.”

She gasped, her mouth staying open for what seemed like ages but was really only a few seconds as another contraction ripped through her. Sarah was humming and hemming and nodding her head along. The boys were in the kitchen, Steve fumbling with the boiling water, and Bucky was gripping the blonde’s arm.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Sarah began to say, “But we’re about to get intimately acquainted.” With no further warning the woman ducked her head and seemed to crawl under her shirt. Winnie let out a startled, breathless laugh. Within seconds Sarah was back up, mouth pursed, and nodding.

“You’re going to be here a while,” she said bluntly. No frills or flowery words, this woman.

Sarah scooted back on her knees and asked, “Anything you need?”

Another contraption swept through Winnie and it felt like the baby was trying to rip its way out of her with teeth and razor sharp claws. Home, she thought, but she shook her head and said, “Just for this to be over!”

Sarah laughed, and it was brittle and harsh, like the snap of a windstorm against the docks. With a smirk she answered, “Well, that’ll come.”

The door slammed open again and George was rushing in, russet curls sticking up on top of his head like he’d been struck by lightning and eyes darting about the room. Dropping whatever odds and ends he was caring, he swept past Sarah Rogers and sat next to her on the couch, grabbing one of her hands. Kissing her sweaty forehead, heedless of Winnie’s attempts to push him away, he said, “ _Carissima_ , should we take you to the hospital?”

He was breathing heavy. Panicked. Just like a man. She shook her head and gestured towards Sarah, telling him that she had what she needed. George turned to her, staring at the blonde woman for a few moments before he asked, “How much longer?”

Sarah stared at him unblinkingly, and answered, “Might be all night. She’s not much dilated yet.”

Winnie glanced to George with his dirt streaked and scratched up hands and said, “George, go get my _mamă_ for me, will you?”

Frozen for a minute or two, reluctant to move, her husband finally nodded. He ruffled Bucky’s hair, who was still in the kitchen, still gripping Steve’s arm tight, as he left.

Sarah laughed. “Can’t deal with a man’s panic, can you? Don’t blame you.” Bucky and Steve finally came over carrying the largest pot they owned, filled to the brim with water, and placed it down next to Sarah. They stood, hovering, unsure what to do now that their task was done. Bucky’s face was pale, his eyes wide. He’d never seen this before and Winnie thinks perhaps she should have sent him off with his father.

Sarah, probably used to a dozens of scared little Irish boys or girls trapped there with their mothers in labor, motioned for the boys to sit down. They huddled at the edge of the couch, hands almost gripping one another’s. She winked at Winnie, then turned to Bucky, then Becca, before she said, “Ever heard of _The Morrigan_?”

Through the contractions, Winnie let Sarah’s voice hold her like an anchor. Bucky and Becca, and even Steve who must have heard these tales a thousand times, watched Sarah with laser focus as she spoke. She told them about the pagan goddess bathing naked in the river Unius on _Samhain_ while she checked Winnie’s temperature. She spun and wove the fairy stories into the air of the _Tuatha Dé_ as she put pressure on Winnie’s stomach, checking to see the position of the baby. She mimicked voices and songs, yelling with a minstrel's passions over the sound of Winnie’s screaming.

As dawn broke, Winnie’s _mamă_ was kneeling behind her, holding her up and saying prayers. The children were passed out huddled together on Bucky’s cot, and George had been left behind with Winnie’s _tată_ and the rest of the family watching Abbi in Winnie’s childhood home.  Sarah’s voice had changed to whispers and then to brisk commands, urging her to push, push, _push._

When her third daughter was finally born, she turned to Winnie and smiled, exhausted and sweaty and said, “Thanks for watching my son these last few months.”

 

~~~~~

August 1937

Sarah wiped her mouth with the rag, tasting the metal and bile in the back of her throat even after the fit of coughing had stopped. Bucky Barnes stood in front of her, but then, in a one tenement in Stuyvesant there really was no where else for the boy to stand while she occupied the only bed, with a large glass of water in his hand. There was a worried look on his handsome face, one she recognized from long years of watching her son’s bouts of sickness, having to give him the last rites five times, and generally just coming home with cuts and bruises all about.

The air smelled like asthma cigarettes, ash and bitter harshness. It smelled like decay and the water, when she could finally drink it down, had the flavor of a tin.

Steve was still at the grocers where he’d held down a job for the last three months, not being struck by anything much worse than fatigue and allergies. Every hour he worked was a relief to Sarah, that was more time he was away from the sickness that was gnawing at her insides, her lungs, and her bones. By all rights, she should be alone now, with no family to speak of. Her brother in some upstate jail, may he rot there, and Joseph’s sister gone and run off god only knew where. Still, Bucky insisted on being here whenever he was off from his uncle’s bookshop and, like clockwork, the lad arrived like a bad penny in their slum everyday.

“You know,” she said to him when he sat down on the edge of the bed, “when I refused your parents offer to come live with them, I didn’t think I’d be seeing your face everyday.” She meant it like a joke and, in past years, it would have sounded like one, but the consumption had wrecked her voice beyond repair. It came out in a wheeze, the way her boy sounded when pneumonia struck, puffing around a matchbox.

He smiled anyway, that charming grin that he flashed at all the dames in his uncle’s bookshop, and all the little old biddys he saw in the streets. It didn’t reach his eyes though. He pulled at his collar, tugging it away from his sweating skin. It was August, so Sarah supposed it must be hot, though it felt like winter’s chill had drawn over her body like a blanket she couldn’t couldn’t escape. His shield, the one his mother had given him for his birthday that year, bounced away from where it had made an imprint into his skin. The chain knocked against the dark bruise at his throat.

Sarah drew her eyes away from it and continued, “You should be at school, boyo, not mucking about here. You’ve brought your mama’s gift.” Sarah gestured over to where he had set down the bread and soup that Winnie had made. “Go on home now.”

A new round of hacking and coughing bent her body forward, almost pitched face first onto the bed. Bucky caught her in his arms, holding her upright, waiting for it to pass. He looked at her with eyes full of concern, but the grin was still on his face when he said, “Mama and Papa are fighting about where to spend Rosh Hashana next week. Papa wants Uncle Isaac, you know how _bubbe_ ’s been glaring at him more and more since _zeyde_ died, but Mama wants to spend it with her mother. I’ll get more rest here, where I can’t hear the screaming.”

Sarah pursed her lips. James Barnes could give an Irishman a run for his money in stubbornness. His grandmother had wanted the boy to go to yeshiva after he’d graduated. His mother had wanted him to go to some music academy. His father, well, he’d wanted a university, Ivy League if he could, and to watch his son become an engineer. None of them had gotten their wish. If the lad wanted to be here, waiting on a dying Irish woman and pulling her body-frail son’s arse out of the fire, then that was exactly where he was going to be.  

“Well, might as well make yourself useful then,” she joked, pushing him back. When had he gotten so strong? She cleared her throat, blood clotting into the rag she brought up to her mouth and continued, “warm up that pot of soup. Heating up is about all you can handle.”

Bucky hesitated, wary of another fit, she could tell that by his eyes, but complied. The soup was a blessing since heaven knew that neither Sarah’s son, nor Bucky, could cook to save a life. They wouldn’t be eating boiled cabbage and potatoes and canned spinach if Winnie Barnes had anything to say about it. Even in these hard times, Winnie managed to make sure that she, and her family, at least had fresh bread even though she worked her fingers to the bone to do it.

“Your mother says you ain’t been to the dance halls lately,” she said, while he stood over the pot stirring up the soup. He was favoring his right leg, she noticed, and he’d been wincing when he’d walked in earlier. She frowned.

“Well,” he answered, “I can’t just take any dame.”

No, Sarah thought, he needed the right partner. One who wasn’t going to expect too much out of a handsome young man.

She laughed, or tried to anyway, but it was sandpaper in her throat and said, “They don’t want you anyway, boyo.”

He turned around, flicking broth towards her with a playful smile, and said, “All dames want me.” He shut off the gas stove, old and rusted and a struggle to lite more often than not, and limped back over to her, ducking under the line where their Sunday best hung to dry.

He continued talking as he sat down on the edge of the bed, handing her the bowl of soup, “Besides, I have to leave some for Steve.”

Had anyone else said those words, they would have seemed dismissive. An afterthought. Sarah knew that all her neighbors thought Steve had one foot in the grave. Hell, for most of his life he had. There was a stack of frozen livers in the icebox that she’d worked her arse off to get that was testament to that. Her boy had grown up handsome though, with her eyes and her hair and none of his father’s surly, straight-backed attempts at being English.

“I’ll just let your mother know that then,” she said, sipping the soup as slowly as she could, “Next time she comes round ranting.” Not that Winnie ranted. More like complained really fast while making sure every inch of the apartment was clean.

“Not sure my Mama wants to hear about what her son gets up to in the dance halls,” Bucky said. His hands were in his lap, fiddling with the edges of his shirt. There were brown spots of old dried blood on it, and newer ones, red and vibrant against the white. Winnie would probably love to hear about it, Sarah thought, if just so that she knew her son still danced. And Sarah… well she knew her son would love to dance with a lass, if he hadn’t inherited his father’s two left feet. She’d seen the dirty sketches that Steve probably thought she had no idea he’d hidden under the couch he slept on, night after night now.

Yes, Steve _liked lasses._  But — Sarah had seen every single of of those dirty sketches.

“True enough,” she said, putting the bowl down on the stack of unpaid bills and notices and newspapers that spoke of the latest happenings overseas. She smirked and continued, “Joseph’s mother absolutely _abhorred_ hearing that her perfect son had been dancing a jig with a lass from Kildare. In Dublin, no less! Joe got many a letter about that, and make no mistake. I think the woman used up all the parchment and ink in Ulster.” She smirked at the thought of the woman’s face if she’d known that Sarah had lied and gotten her son buried in a Catholic plot.

She lowered her voice into a whisper, as if she was about to impart to the lad some great secret and said, “Don’t bring home a Protestant. More trouble than they’re worth.”

Bucky laughed and it was loud and boisterous and so healthy it was music to her ears. The best harp playing she’d ever heard. His fingers pressed against the bruise on his neck when he answered, “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind ma’am.”

Her mother’s rosary beads, untouched for years, were in her lap. She bypassed them to reach towards the lad, the palm of her own hand outstretched. He stopped his ministrations and placed his own hand in hers, wincing a little, for show more than anything, she had hardly any strength left, when she squeezed his hand. She gestured towards the mirror over the sink, fogged up with stains that wouldn’t come off, and he looked to her quizzically after he glanced at it.

“Steve’s gonna be covering that up soon,” she told him. He’d use a towel or something. Maybe her old mantilla, though that was see through, but he wasn’t going to be able to spare the sheets. Bucky’s eyebrow raised in confusion and he opened his mouth once, then twice, than a third time.

Finally gathering his bearings he said, “Ma’am, I know that people say Steve ain’t much of a looker, and yeah he’s a twig, but he doesn’t have a bad face. Not enough that he’s gonna be covering up your mirror.”

Sarah wanted to laugh at Bucky’s indignant defense of her son, but this was a serious matter. She shook her head instead and corrected him, “Tradition. I’m not going to be here much longer.”

The lad opened his mouth, to deny it no doubt, to make her feel better, but every inch of her aching body knew it better than anyone else. She glared at him, leveling her best angry mother expression that had put the fear of a beating in her son’s mind a time or two, and he stayed silent.

“Don’t bother,” she whispered harshly, “Truth is the truth. It’s happening. Look at me, James.” She stressed the name and Bucky froze, every muscle tense, his hand a furnace in her own. No one ever called him James. Not even his mother.

She gripped his fingers as tight as she could. If it was twenty odd years ago, back when she was holding up signs and taking punches from police officers, she could have made a pretense of breaking the fragile bones underneath his skin. As it was, he barely noticed, although his eyes never wavered from her own. The cocky grin was gone and in its place was a straight line, the look of a man on a boy.

She spoke without interruption, in the tone she used for a particular unruly patient, a command, when she told him, “You best take care of my son. I know you can’t keep him out of trouble. No, he’s got a devil’s streak in him, make no mistake. He’ll do what he will. But you best be there to pick up the pieces, make sure he’s breathing, because if you don’t, God help me, I will haunt you for the rest of your life. You hear?”

It wasn’t enough that her boy came from alley fights with shiners because some arse had bothered a lady, or said something out of turn, called out foul words loud enough that even his bad ear could hear them. If they weren’t careful, well, there were ropes and bats and all sorts of unpleasant things in store for them. She needed him to know that. _To understand that_.

“To the end of my life,” he answered, not even a waver in his voice. He gripped her hand in his own, steady and straight-backed. She nodded and closed her eyes, the strength seeping from her body, coming out of her veins and pores as if from a sieve. She collapsed back against the thin pillow, back sore against the ragged wall. She wondered, not for the first time, if this was how Joe had felt in that last month after he’d been shipped back from the war in ‘17, dying of a sickness he couldn’t shake. Suddenly, the bed shifted from underneath her as the lad moved, scooting closer, his arms a warm weight around her trembling shoulders.

She opened one eye and glared at him, trying to push him back as she said, “Your death’ll be soon if you keep that up.”

“Nonsense,” Bucky said, shaking his head. He reached up to smooth back some of her greying hair away from her forehead and her eyes.

He began to sing to her, a song she recognized from some musical the Barnes’ had gone to years ago when they’d scraped up enough money, taking Steve along. Her son had come back brokenly singing the tune, not understanding a lick of the words.

“ _S’iz a finstere nakht un ikh zits mir un trakht_ ,” he sang, head propped back against the wall, “ _mayn lebn hot gornisht keyn vert…_ ”

 

~~~~~~

January 1943

There was fire in his veins, burning through his skin and charring his insides. Bucky couldn’t even scream anymore, could barely let out the syllables of his serial number and rank, an endless loop meant for capture, all but useless to stop the pain. The creepy bald scientist with the voice like a leech and ant-burning glasses had left him, _finally,_  after weeks of his creepy caresses and mysterious needles that made his skin melt and his muscles move like lava. He thinks about stopping his rhyme, now that man is gone, but who knows when he’ll come back.

He’s been gone before.

If there were tears in his eyes they had long since dried out. If there were prayers in his head that his mama had taught him to say when he was young, he couldn’t remember the words, though he could understand the commands in German the scientist would make for “more,” “syringes,” and “working.” He didn’t know what was working. He’d been working before, with his only soldier left from the 107th, Dugan, and a hodgepodge of other men. Good men, all of them. Even though they were all schmucks. Or maybe he was the schmuck. They’d told him not to piss off Loehner, but the asshole had deserved the beat down. He was a bully and Bucky could hear Steve in his head, chewing him out for not doing something sooner. The bruises that had bloomed on his skin afterwards, at the hands of the kraut guards, they’d been worth it.

This though, this scalding he was under? This wasn’t worth it. He could also hear his mama in his head, warning him to keep quiet, keep safe, keep his head down.

Oh Mama, he thought, when do I ever keep my head down?

The room was dark, which meant it must be getting dark outside. Night stopped the poisons and potions but it didn’t stop the pain. That had become his constant companion, here alone in the dark. Italy was different from home, green and full of flowers, with dames who watched them from the windows of the sidewalks, sometimes silent, sometimes daring to walk up and press offerings into his hand of bread, calling him “ _caro_.” He’d smile at them and kiss their hands with a “ _bellissima_ ” because his mama had taught him to be polite and making a dame feel good had never been a bad thing. It was different from North Africa too, with its dirt and its dust and the sun shining down on him all day long only to freeze his nuts off under the moon.

He’d wanted to get away from home, but not like this. Not with a letter in the mailbox informing him all choice was gone, Steve back at home with his drawing pad in the corner, maybe starting out the window wanting to be over here, and strapped to a table as a pincushion for a fucked up kraut. He’d wanted to see the Pacific and the Grand Canyon, sit there and flirt while Steve sketched for hours. Steve wouldn’t want to sketch this.

A surge of fire flitted up from his brains again, causing him to stutter. Was he still speaking? Bucky didn’t know. Lots of times he didn’t even know what was what. He saw his mama, in the corner, and he wanted to tell her to run, get away from here, far away. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, he hadn’t kept his promise to her. Denying himself in the army, the empty dog tags, hadn’t helped. She stared at him, silent and still, too still, she’d never been so in life, with her hair grey and pushed back.

One time, with Wagner playing in the background because the scientist wanted music while he worked, he saw Becca, sitting by the piano that was always in the corner of the living room no matter what place they lived in. Her curls were cut short, pushed back under a bandana, and she was wearing trousers and a blouse. “Don’t join the army, sis, it’s nothing but trouble.” The scientist had given him an odd look then, tapping his glass syringe, and Bucky thought he must have said it out loud.

He never saw Abbi and little Mimi, and he was grateful for that. Papa though, Papa he saw, hard and straight-backed, with trembling hands, a bottle of gin clutched in his hands, with a glare in his eyes. Papa who he hadn’t uttered a word to since he and Steve moved out back in ‘38, from one smelly, damp apartment in DUMBO to the next, cast off and pushed out. Papa who refused to acknowledge his queer son. Bucky spat at him, sometimes. Called him a useless waste of a man who never made his mama happy a day in her life, ignored his family so that he could go dunk his head in a vat. Screamed at him, again and again and again — like he hadn’t in life while his mama was pleading at him to “stay” just _stay_ , and he hadn’t — that he didn’t need him.

Sometimes, when the pain was too much, when he felt like a volcano about to erupt and he couldn’t help the sounds that exploded from his lips, he wanted to be eleven years old again, back before the depression, before the _real_ drunk times, and have his papa sing him songs about a Naples he’d never seen again. He wanted to see Mama dancing around the living room, hear Becca playing the piano, watch Abbi struggle with the violin, and hear little Mimi add her cries. Wanted to smell candlewax and spice and challah and honey cakes. The ancient smell of books and scrolls at his uncle’s store, the smell of drying ink at the paper. Hear his _bubbe_ and his _zeyde_ pray again, the words washing over him like a melody. Wanted to wait outside the cathedral on Sunday mornings for Steve and Sarah and walk with them home. Wanted to drag Steve into the temple, see his eyes go wide with fascination again and his mouth open in a little “o,” knowing that the punk was going to sketch everything he saw.

He wanted to dance with him, under the stars, on their little balcony, doesn’t matter which one, DUMBO or Flatbush, and hold him close while the trumpets play and the salt wafts up from the water.

Then he’d wake up and smell chemicals and ashes and that horrid, grotesque smell that he couldn’t even describe. The one that came from the ovens. The one that was just _wrong_ down to every fiber of his being. The scientist would look at him, tell him “don’t worry, _mein Soldat_ , you’re meant for more.” And Bucky shivered, and shivered, and hadn’t stopped shivering since. The shivers made him think of his men, all of them, Dugan from the remnants of the 107th, and Gabe Jones, a colored man who’d given up Howard to be here, Morita from _Fresno_ , and Monty with his posh accent and Dernier, who Bucky couldn’t understand because “dammit, I ain’t ever learned French, that’s not one of the languages I know.” They best have stopped fighting by now, or Bucky would rip them a new one. If he ever got out.

He would never get out.

The one who he saw the most though was Steve. Steve with his weak lungs and his fists and his rage, screaming at the world, itching to go to war after the attack in ‘41, talking about patriotism and duty. _“It isn’t a privilege, Steve, it’s death and it's waiting and it’s not knowing whether you’re going to make it back that night, let alone make it home. It’s knowing that you can’t make anymore promises, to anyone, because it’s out of your hands whether you’re keeping them or not._ ” Bucky would think about Sarah then, reduced down to nothing, and the promise he’d made. Staring through his sniper rifle, enemy soldiers like ants so far away, falling as their strings were cut, bullets sweeping through the air, and promised her, yes, this was still keeping her son safe.

Bucky would dream, when he would sleep, and he hardly ever slept. Steve, over a large sketch pad in an office with a bunch of other skinny twigs, sketching up funnies or comics or dirty mags. That was what sending the punk to art school had been for, wasn’t it? So one day he could be some Picasso? So that he didn’t bounce from block to block, a grocer, a secretary, a cashier. He would dream about lips he hadn’t kissed in so long, years, since the last time they’d called it quits, and limbs he hadn’t touched for even longer. Dream about the smell of cabbage, and the iron tint of liver, and the rackety cot they needed to huddle up in for warmth. Lying awake at night, listening to the catch of a heartbeat, then the stop of it, and the wheezing and crackling in lungs. Hoping for it to keep going and never stop.

“ _When I was boxing, all those times, when you weren’t there, me and Arnie Roth, sometimes we’d sneak into the locker rooms, and we wouldn’t box. I’m sorry, but…_ ” Bucky would whisper brokenly into Steve’s bad ear.

Something loud was echoing. It was a sort of _whizzing clamor_ , like an alarm. Bucky stared at the ceiling, mouth moving, and he couldn’t hear the words. There was Steve, his little punk, blue eyes staring at him, and he whispered, _“All those dames? The ones I’d take to the dancehall? Most of them were my cousin Dinah’s babydolls. Never did anything with any of them. The double-dates? Most of them didn’t want anything either. I’m sorry, I never told you. I wanted you to be happy but...I’m weak and selfish. I’m sorry. The last ones, at the Stark Expo, that was real. For you.”_

“Bucky,” he heard and it brought him out of his reverie with a bang like a gun. No one knew that name here. No one. He blinked and Steve was gone, faded away. Someone tall, and strong, and handsome, and blonde, was in front of him.

He had Steve’s face. But it couldn’t be Steve.

Not-Steve smiled at him, with eyes full of worry and concern, and the restraints were being undone, “Bucky, it’s me, Steve.”

“Steve?” he asked, and he could smell something burning, and how could this be Steve? What kind of wacky trip was he on now? He got up from the table for the first time in forever and his legs should have been atrophied. He should have been stumbling, falling down, anything but following this man that claimed to be Steve and called him Bucky, down the hall.

He was smaller.

“Is it permanent?” he asked, when Steve starts speaking words and even in his hallucinations Steve’s a punk who made dumb decisions and took chances with his life because no one in their right mind was going to sign up for some experimental science project to turn themselves into Superman.

Steve ain’t never been in his right mind, his conscience reminded him.

Within minutes, they were standing over a gaping volcano and Bucky glared at the kraut scientist on the other side. Steve’s speaking words, and Bucky would be having some words with the punk later when they get out of this because yes, he was a guy from Brooklyn, and what the fuck is he doing here, but right now Bucky wanted to _kill_. He’s killed before, in this war, but he’d never wanted to push someone into a fiery chasm so badly until now. The other kraut with him is making grand speeches from his soapbox, and then like an alien in a dime sci-fi novel began to peel off his face. Bucky knew that even ‘shrooms couldn’t get him high enough to dream that shit up.

“You don’t have one of those do you?” he asked Steve. Like every villain in a comic book the krauts leave and they’re stuck there, with the building burning down around them and they’re about to die. The bridge was shaky and precarious and he wanted to shout at Steve to go first but before he knew it he was stumbling across it, perched over the volcano, and in one moment, then two, he’s standing on the other side. His breath was knocked out of him with a sucker punch as the bridge collapsed behind him. Steve still on the other side.

“Go,” Steve told him, and in no way was Bucky going to leave. If Steve was going to die here then so was he.

“Not without you,” he screamed back at the punk, and there are prayers he’s supposed to say but his mind was still fuzzy. The words slipped away from him as he watched Steve wrestle with himself on the other side.

Steve, the damn fool punk, _jumped_.

 

~~~~~~

June 1952

Becca Proctor simply cannot get used to New Jersey. The sound of the cars on the suburban street and the quiet when they left, was unpleasant, exacerbated even more because no one walked in this neighborhood. It was too far from her mama, alone in that small apartment in Flatbush now that Mimi has gone off to university, with only her babbling brothers to keep her company. The nearest temple was one that she had to have Richard drive her too but there are seven different churches within a ten minute walk. Worst of all though, she hated the monotony. The endless cooking and cleaning and taking care of her son. The parents meetings at the elementary school, the backyard parties, and the lunch time chattering because none of the women here seemed to have a job.

Becca felt at odds with a lot of things these days, since the end of the war. The newspapers and the radio and pictures showing the devastation, the atrocities, over in Europe. She hated the memory of the day after she’d come home. The knock on the door and when she caught her screaming mama in her arms while blank-eyed army men told her that her brother — her _brothers_ , really — were gone, a month or two or three after they actually were. She spat and she cursed at them and her papa, physical in ways she was never allowed to be, slammed the door. It seemed like ever since then all her life had just been closing doors.

There’d been a memorial. The army had paid to take them all to Washington where the President had shook her father’s hand and congratulated him on having such a fine son. The surreal feeling of hearing the guns and the salutes and being in a graveyard far from home with no community and no kaddish, not even a priest for Steve, and worst of all, no bodies. Just empty coffins and headstones with names and dates that say nothing about who the two men were. Surrounded by people mourning who she didn’t know. The people from stories she’d never heard in the letters she’d received from Bucky, the secrets he hadn’t been allowed to tell her.

There were radio shows and comics and a truly horrible movie that made her brother into a caricature of a young boy, and no one knew who Bucky Barnes really was. The newsreels they captured during the war —that Becca all the way over in the Pacific hadn’t seen — the few that showed his face, unrecognizably sullen and stony, were few and far between and no one had ever said, “This is Sergeant James Barnes.” Steve, broad and tall and healthy, a show for the cameras; a puppet on a string. Her own husband didn’t even know who Captain America really was. Still the government’s damn secret.

She hissed and cursed, “ _vaffanculo,”_ when the hot water from the tap seemed to boil over onto her wrist. She pulled her hands back from the dishes she was washing and put it up to her mouth to suck at it. The dish clattered with a loud _clang_ into the sink and she wondered if her son, Adam, had heard. Waiting for a few minutes and hearing nothing that indicated the little boy was concerned or drawn away from his toys, she sighed and turned off the tap. She left the dish rag laying next to the drain and walked out of the kitchen to the living room, sparing only a glance for the vacuum cleaner she had taken out of the closet earlier, before she collapsed on the couch and stared at the brand new television Richard had brought home.

“Well,” she said to the air, “another day.” Her head hit the back of the couch within a few minutes, her muscles loosening, and she stared at the dusty old piano that hadn’t been played in six years, since before Adam had been born. She glared at it and said, “If I hadn’t gone back to playing you in the dance halls, I wouldn’t be out here in the country.”

Bucky would have told her she’d gone nuts, talking to the air and inanimate objects as if they were going to answer her back, but they gave her better conversation than Richard had in a long, long time. Richard with his ties and his perfectly combed hair, his cigars and his dream of the white picket fence. Richard with his salesman job. She stared at the phone on the wall above the piano, the one that they _owned_.

Richard wanted to put a pool in the backyard for Adam. Becca and her siblings only went to a pool once or twice in the summers and that was a community pool. Abbi hadn’t been able to swim and would sit on the ledge, watching Bucky and Steve wrestle in the water, while Becca would make sure that Mimi didn’t manage to drown herself. Adam would have to bring over friends and he would have pool toys.

Without care, she put up her feet, clad in house slippers, on the coffee table. The picture of her mother-in-law on the mantle in the corner seemed to stare down its nose at her in disgust, but that was nothing new. Becca had been a no account in her eyes since the day Richard had brought her home with him. Childishly, she flipped the picture off.

A few minutes later her eyebrows scrunched as the sound of the doorbell, _ding ding ding_ , echoed around her living room. She hoped it wasn’t her neighbor Nancy, with her loud voice and penchant for nosy gossip, or her other neighbor Drew, with his excuses about cups of sugar so he could stare at her chest.

The woman standing on her doorstep was not one of her neighbors. She was too straight-backed, with her feet apart just enough, and eyes scanning the surrounding area for threats without moving her head. She was beautiful, with her vibrant brown hair and her perfect hat, and smiling with utter politeness at Becca when she opened the door. At first, Becca was conscious of her haphazardly thrown back hair, the house dress with questionable stains, and the fact that Susan Richards across the street was sitting on her porch suspiciously not looking in their direction. Then she placed the woman in front of her. She had only seen her once, at the memorial, but she had heard about her and she recalled how the soldier had placed Steve’s rolled up flag in _this_ woman’s arms.

Becca crossed her arms and stood straighter before she asked, “Can I help you, Ms. Carter?”

If the woman was startled because Becca remembered her, she didn’t show it. She simply inclined her head and asked back, “May I come in, Mrs. Proctor?”

Becca honestly debated slamming the door in her face and perhaps she would have if Susan Richards had stopped trying to pretend like she wasn’t looking over here. Instead, she opened the door wide enough for Ms. Carter to pass through and she pointed wordlessly towards the couch. Ms. Carter understood her silent command, taking off her hat — and Becca noticed that her hair was still perfect underneath with no sign of disarray — and moved to sit down, crossing her legs. Becca shot a sort of grimace across the street that she hoped with the distance Susan Richards would take as a smile and jerked her hand in a half-wave before she closed the door.

She shot a look at the stairs, hoping her son wasn’t on it spying, but they were bare. She stood, wringing her wrist in her left hand, looking at Ms. Carter who stared back at her unruffled. There was protocol for these kinds of things right, Becca asked herself.

She cleared her throat and asked, “Want some tea or something?” There, that was a nicety. Tea. A perfectly _English_ thing, tea. People from across the pond preferred that and she thought there might be some in the back of the cabinets, shoved behind the coffee tins. A concession bought for her mama when she moved in last year, hadn’t even been opened yet.  

Ms. Carter smiled and said, “That would be lovely, thank you.” She had taken off her gloves and her scarf and placed them neatly in her lap. Becca jerked her head and went into the kitchen. The dish rag had fallen into the soapy water that she’d left undrained and the cake plate, the stuff that was supposed to be for company, was empty. She scowled at it and opened the fridge, looking for something edible, something she didn’t have to cook. Richard’s lunch meat was in there.

“Ham all right?” she called towards the direction of the living room. Ms. Carter answered with a “yes” and so she pulled it out of the fridge, slapping it on two slices of sliced white bread with some mayonnaise, and put the kettle on for some tea. She stood there for a few minutes, staring at the pot, and wondered what the English woman wanted. They hadn’t heard from her since the memorial, had really expected never to see her again, though they occasionally got letters from some of her brother’s fellow soldiers.

After the water had boiled and the tea had been put in the cups, she walked out, balancing the plate with the sandwich on her arm. Ms. Carter took it from her and smiled — she smiled a lot, Becca thought, — and thanked her for the offerings. Becca nodded and sat down next to her, placing a distance of two or three inches between them.

“Are you not having anything?” Ms. Carter asked, gesturing towards her lack of plate. Becca pulled her lip back a little bit at the sight of the ham sandwich.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m not hungry.” Not an excuse, not really, that cake plate hadn’t been empty for nothing.

Ms. Carter simply nodded and sipped at her tea. The air was filled with tension Becca could probably cut with a spoon and she swallowed her own tea, waiting for the other woman to say something. Ms. Carter was biting her lip, her face a bit strained, and Becca wasn’t sure if that was due to the horrible tea or what kind of business had brought the woman here.

“How are your parents?” Ms. Carter asked, looking at Becca with completely focused eyes as if she was actually interested and this wasn’t just a way to start conversation. For all Becca knew, she was. Her brother had never told her anything about this woman, after all. Maybe it was too secret, part of all the redacted bits in black ink, maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to talk about the woman Steve Rogers had apparently fallen in love with.

“Papa’s dead. Three years now,” she said and there was no use being demure or sugar coating her word, though she left out the _liver failure_ that was on the tip of her tongue. Ms. Carter’s expression had become one of sympathy and Becca wrung her hand around her wrist again. Not wanting to dwell on anything, certainly not the memory of her father, shaking and mumbling, clutching Bucky’s rolled up flag, she continued, “Mama’s as alright as can be. Abbi’s gotten married and Mimi’s went to university. First of us to go.”

She said the last bit of information with the first bit of pride in her voice in a long time. Mimi had worked shifts as a waitress since graduating high school in order to go to university. She didn’t talk about her mama’s letters, the sadness and grief that clung to them like perfume, or Mama’s refusal to erect graves for her brother, or for Steve given that after Bucky she’d been listed as next-of-kin, not until there were bodies to bury.

“Ste...Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes mentioned your mother often. She sounds like a lovely woman,” Ms. Carter told her. Becca noticed the formality and wondered at it. It’s not like she didn’t know what they had been to one another. She also noticed that Ms. Carter had said nothing about her father and she wondered whether that meant that Bucky hadn’t spoken of him at all, or whether he had.

“She is,” Becca said and, maybe because of awkwardness or maybe because she was a bit on the defense, she pointed out, “Never screamed once the times that Steve stumbled in drunk off his ass. The first time, after Steve’s ma died, Papa had to help him through the hangover. He wasn’t a pretty sight.”

She wondered whether that would shock her. The world knew Captain America as some perfect, stalwart man. The picture of morals and virtue and all that other bullshit nonsense that meant nothing really. Steve Rogers had been a prickly man, compassionate yes, but his shaking firsts hadn’t just been pointed at injustices overseas. Steve would have had some choice things to say about that McCarthy man.

Ms. Carter just laughed, a full belly laugh, genuine and pure and with delight. For the first time since the woman had arrived Becca felt her lips begin to quirk up in a smile at the sparkle in the woman’s brown eyes. When the English woman had finally managed to catch her breath she turned to face Becca fully and said, “That does sound like something Steve would do.”

From the new position where she was sitting, Ms. Carter could see the only picture that Becca had of her brother and Steve. Sixteen years old, sitting together on the stoop of the Barnes’ apartment in Flatbush, her brother’s left arm was slung around Steve’s skinny shoulders, the other full of a mangy black cat, while Steve was leaning just a bit back against Bucky. Mimi and Abbi was standing in the doorway, with only their little faces visible in the background. Ms. Carter smiled wistfully, her eyes turning sad as she looked at it.

“We borrowed that camera,” Becca told her, “from my Uncle Isaac. Mama wanted pictures, for some reason or other. She didn’t think Bucky’d want to include the cat.” Becca pointed at the tiny black blob. “Mama hated it. It was a stray. Bucky started feeding it when he about fourteen and it kept coming around. He even named it. Ariel. Said it was just like a lion, managing to survive the wild Brooklyn alleys.” Mama had given her the picture when she’d left, claiming that the cat ruined it.

“Cats will do that,” Ms. Carter said, “They’re survivors. I’m afraid I didn’t know your brother that well, Mrs. Proctor. We didn’t have much of a chance to bond during the war.” She looked sad and Becca knew it was genuine. This woman would have honestly wanted to know her brother. She swallowed around the lump in her throat.

For about an hour or so, they sat there trading stories. Peggy, who had finally broken and asked to drop the formalities about ten minutes into the conversation, told her about Steve learning to drive a motorcycle on the front and crashing into a farmer’s pile of hay. In turn, Becca told her about her brother’s attempts to get rid of Steve’s two left feet. Peggy mentioned her brother’s visits to Howard Stark — that rich scientist! — and how Mr. Stark would talk about how much fascination Bucky found in his inventions. Becca than told her about the conventions that Bucky had dragged Steve to, and the fairs, and Steve’s half-hearted attempts at protesting. They complained for a good fifteen minutes about their mutual distaste of the Captain America legend and radio shows, and Becca laughed about the newest historian speculating in the paper, pointing out some of the sillier ideas, “They think my brother was born in March or something. Where they got that, I don’t know. Some other soldier named James Barnes I guess.”

Neither of them talked about the darkness that surely had surrounded her brother and Steve, or the grief that was wrapped around themselves. Finally, when it was about half past two, Becca drew herself back from the pleasant lull the memory sharing had brought about.

“Peggy, what are you really here to ask about?” she asked, “I highly doubt it was just to swap stories.”

Peggy smiled and nodded her head, “You’re right, of course.” She looked around the room, taking in the television set and the pristine chairs with the plastic wrap covering them, and then glanced toward the ceiling where Adam was playing undisturbed upstairs. She clasped her hands together and sat straight up. “Becca, I am here to offer you a job with S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Becca stared at her, every muscle frozen. She knew what S.H.I.E.L.D. was, although she probably shouldn’t, because of one of Timothy Dugan’s letters, and she wondered if Peggy was out of her mind. Just like Steve, she thought, to find someone else as crazy as him.

“You may decline of course,” Peggy said, misconstruing her silence, “there is no pressure. It would require a lot of uprooting in your life. We’re still a small operation,” she pointed out, without explaining what S.H.I.E.L.D. was which probably meant she was fully aware of Dugan’s slip, “and the pay wouldn’t be much at first. The hours are long and we’d require trips, of course, and most of the time you wouldn’t be able to tell your husband about where you were going. I’ll understand if you need to think about it and discuss it with Mr. Proctor.”

Becca cleared her throat and said, “That won’t be necessary.” She looked over to the picture of Steve and Bucky, both of whom seemed to be staring at her in challenge, and then glanced to the disgusted picture of her mother-in-law. Peggy’s face had fallen when she finally turned back.

“I understand,” Peggy said, glancing at the stuffed animal that Adam had left on the floor near the foot of the couch.

“I don’t think you do,” Becca said, “and I need to know something. Are you offering me this because of my brother and Steve?” She wasn’t going to accept some job out of pity.

Peggy’s eyes went wide and she shook her head and said, “While your brother and Steve did talk about your capabilities, my hiring standards are a bit more than nepotism. Your WAC file speaks for your qualities.”

Becca nodded, relieved that the offer was about more than Steve. Richard won’t like it, she thought, didn’t think wives should work. Then again, her conscious pointed out, you only married him to get out of the house and he was just the first louse to offer. Biting her lip, she asked, “Are there babysitters? Daycare? For Adam.”

Peggy smiled, her face once again open when she told Becca that it was small right now, run by a woman named Angie Martinelli, a good friend of hers, but that everything would be done to take care of her and her son.

 

~~~~~~

February 1964

Abbi glared at the glue like dough that seemed to be melting with the non-existent heat of winter around the raspberry jam filling, allowing it to overflow onto the parchment paper, of her _hamentashen._ The kitchen smelled like apricots and melted margarine, sugar and honey, and the aromatic smell of chicken soup simmering in the pot on the stove. It really shouldn’t have been that upsetting that _one_ batch, out of the three she’d already made ready to take to the community center, hadn’t come out. Sighing, she pushed it away from her and it hit the wall with a loud _clang_.

“Everything good in there?” her husband, Michele, called from the living room. She could hear the sound of the radio talk show discussing the recent revelation of who Captain America had been before the serum, ever since the government had finally released that information. Abbi didn’t really need to listen to it, since she was familiar with the way Steve Rogers had hated both raisins and dates and had snored like a freight train. Michele, and by extension Lila, since the little girl was wrapped around her father’s ankles like a limpet, were fascinated by the man behind the national myth of this new country he still couldn’t manage to call home even after more than ten years.

Growling, all her muscles tensed, she went over to stir the pot of soup to make sure that it at least wasn’t ruined. The phone above the small and round kitchen table, newly installed with the money that Jim Morita had sent a couple of months ago, stayed stubbornly silent. Perhaps Mimi’s flight had not landed yet? How long did it take for one to get from Georgia to New York? Things had to be tense down south if Mimi was taking off from work in February to come up here. She hissed when her elbow hit the side of the bowl where the artichokes for the _carciofi alla giudìa_ were waiting in lemon juice to be fried once the rest of the family had arrived.

“Abigail,” Michele called again, “ _Stai bene_?” There was a hint of worry in his voice now, as there often was whenever she failed to answer him, indicated by the fact that he had slipped into Italian and forgotten to speak in English. She closed her eyes, the inside of her brain pounding behind him, and answered that yes, she was fine.

Was her sister even coming today? Maybe it was tomorrow. She would be here before Purim. Abbi was sure of that. She wasn’t sure when her mama was set to arrive, later today hopefully, or else the soup and the artichokes she’d spent her last paycheck on from working overtime at the hospital would go to waste.

The familiar sharp, scraping sound of metal against the linoleum floors of their small row home in Crown Heights echoed in her ears. She looked behind her to see her husband rolling in, four year old Lila perched on his lap, eyes never leaving the picture book in her hands. As usual whenever Abbi saw them together she was struck by how similar they looked, the same black curls and olive skin, with the same almond shaped hazel eyes. Her daughter seemed to have inherited nothing from her, there wasn’t even a hint of russet highlights in those tresses.

His eyes landed on the cookie tray and with an internal groan Abbi noticed that some of the raspberry jam had gotten stuck to the wall. Michele’s hand went up to adjust the _yarmulke_ on his head, a nervous gesture that he seemed to perform more and more lately.

“ _Dolcezza_ ,” he started to say, “Are you sure you are up for this? We could always cancel.” Whether this meant the party at the community center with dozens of excited children or this being all of her family — except Becca, who never seemed to stop working though Abbi had no idea what she even did — under one roof she wasn’t really sure. It was understandable that he was worried about her, after the latest incident at the hospital when she’d had an episode bathing one of her patients, but really, she was _fine_. She had promised Mrs. Goldberg that she would deliver the cookies and she was going to keep that promise.

“My family are already on their way,” she told him, sure this time that yes, today was the day everyone was set to arrive, “And I’ve already made so many _hamantashen_. Who is going to eat two hundred of them. Lila?”

“I eat cookies, Mama,” the little girl answered, looking up from her book. She held her hand out for a treat, smiling with all of her chubby cheeks. There was a plate on the table that Abbi had set aside for her, one filled with chocolate and the other with apricot, next to the pile of envelopes that neither Abbi nor Michele had had the heart to open. The one on the top, with the bold red ink, was perched on the others like a bomb about to go off.

“Yes you do, _principessa_ ,” Michele told her, ruffling her curls. He rolled over to the kitchen table so that Lila could enjoy the sweet treats that Abbi had left for her. Her daughter didn’t often enjoy sugary things, only during holidays would Abbi allow herself to spend money that needed to otherwise go towards keeping the heat on or the water running. The little girl stumbled through blessing before she began shoving the food into her mouth with little grace of finesse. Michele eyed the one open envelope on the table, the newest one from Jim Morita, with its unopened check.

Before he could say anything, Abbi told him, “Mama says Becca’s engaged again. Some dentist from New Jersey. Abraham Hoffman, I think she said his name was.” She wondered if her sister would actually stand under a _chuppah_ this time or if the engagement would be broken off like the one five years ago. Becca had caused Mama all of her final gray hairs since her divorce from her first husband. Michele hummed through pursed lips. He didn’t approve of Becca too much, running off and disappearing for weeks and leaving her son (even though he had had a _bar mitzvah_ three years ago) with their mother or unknown friends that none of them had ever met.

Abbi had hoped maybe a rant about her sister would draw him away from the contents of the table but she watched his eyes flicker between the red ink envelope and the opened one before she turned her back on them to stir the soup. She watched the bits of chicken floating on the waves of simmering bubbles created by the heated broth.

After a few minutes, the only sounds in the house broken up by Lila’s chewing, Abbi continued, “Mimi and Jacob will be staying a couple of weeks. It will be nice for Lila to have her cousin around.” Mimi’s son, three years older than Lila, was a rambunctious boy. Hopefully he would bring her little girl out of her shell for a while, pull her away from the picture books and the radio. Michele grunted, his disapproval of her youngest unmarried sister clear from the sound. Abbi rolled her eyes and said nothing back.

“Abigail,” he said, “What are you planning on doing with that money this time?” His voice was permeated with his disdain for the contents of the envelope _and_ the man who sent it. Everytime something from Jim Morita arrived, Michele took it as a personal affront that he couldn’t provide for his family, especially since the accident at the shop had cost him the use of his legs.

Abbi sighed and shut off the burner for the soup. Turning around with a fast jerk that made her head spin unpleasantly, she ordered Lila to go into the living room with her coloring book. Startled, looking between her mama and papa, the little girl went reluctantly.

Glaring at him, she placed her hands on her hips and stood with her feet planted firmly apart. Snapping her tongue against the roof of her mouth she said, “I intended to put it towards the rent. Or do you want to lose the house? Uproot Lila? Perhaps my mother and her brothers have room for us. By all means, if that is what you want, go ahead. Let us pack up our lives!”

He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face then said, “Of course I do not. But you don’t even know this man, how can you accept this… this pity from him?”

She threw up her hands in the air, “He was my brother’s friend. I have told you a thousand times that my brother’s friends send us money to help us. Because they cared about Bucky.”

Michele rolled his eyes and Abbi hated it when he did that. It meant he was about to dig in his heels and be a belligerent ass worse than her brother or her papa ever could have been when they were in their moods. Her head pounded and circles danced in front of her eyes but she refused to waver or sit down. She wanted the higher ground.

“What?” she snapped. “What are you going to say this time?” She loved her husband, she really did, but sometimes she wanted to take his stubborn Sephardic bones and drown him in the Hudson.

“He was a part of your brother’s unit, not his friend,” Michele said, sticking his bottom lip out and waving his hand in the air dismissively. Abbi felt a flash of anger run through her because he hadn’t been there when Jim Morita had wrapped his suit jacket around her at the memorial for Bucky and Steve and tried to cheer her up by telling her about all the good deeds that Bucky had done in Europe.

“Oh, you think that, but you’ll listen to that nonsense on the radio about Steve? Just because they know his name now, doesn’t mean they know bupkis about who he was,” she said, remembering that the latest host had said that Steve Rogers had protested the New Deal. Which was utter bullshit. If he’d been buried in a grave, Steve would have been turning over in it.

“You knew Steve Rogers. You’ve met this Morita what? Once? Twice?” her husband asked. His arms were flailing about the air in that Italian way of his.

“I’m using the money. Deal with it,” she said with a practiced tone of finality in her voice from having this same fight over and over again. She startled and turned around when the phone began to ring, slamming her elbow on the over door with a loud _bang_.

“ _Căcat_ ,” she hissed, cradling her elbow. The phone kept ringing. “Who is that?”

Michele’s eyes softened and his hands hovered over the wheels like he was about to roll towards her. Tone shifting from annoyed to concerned he said, “Your sister has probably arrived at the airport.”

Abbi nodded and closed her eyes, moving to the phone. Sighing, she said, “Right. Eat some _hamentashen_ , dinner will be a while.”

Picking up the phone, she wrapped her hand around the cord and said pleasantly, “Abigail Capello, may I help you.”

The person on the other end of the line was certainly not her sister. Her sister, being her sister, had never had such a deep voice and wouldn’t have called her “Mrs. Capello.”

The man on the other line continued to speak, “... my name is Abraham Rosenthal. I am a legal representative of the estate of Sergeant James Barnes. His last will and testament has designated that you, as well as your sisters Rebecca and Miriam, and your mother Winifred, are to receive a portion of any funds that he may have had. I would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience.”

Abbi blinked, and held the phone away from her like it was an alien. The tinny voice on the other side kept talking in a static way. She moved it back and forth a few times, catching every other word.

When he was finally done talking she said, “I’m sorry. What money? Bucky didn’t have any money.” Her brother and Steve had been so broke they’d lived in a tenement with a bathtub in the kitchen! There was a crash behind her and a curse. Michele had knocked his wheelchair into the table again.

“Given that Captain Rogers was only officially declared dead with the release of his identity to the public,” the lawyer, Rosenberg or something, told her, “your brother’s has been publicized as well. Officially, he has been listed as M.I.A. since 1944. Since he was never declared dead, his pay has been accumulating, ma’am. However, I have been contacted recently by Howard Stark and missions to the Alps have ceased. The military has officially declared your brother deceased, therefore, his last will and testament may now be carried out.” Her fingers numbed, the phone hit the floor with a crash. The little static tinny voice faded away as she grabbed the counter.

“ _Cara mia, che cos’hai_?” Michele asked, rolling up to her and putting his hand on her elbow to turn her around. Abbi choked on the laugh that seemed to have gotten stuck in her throat, collapsing into her husband’s arms.

Kissing him once, then twice, she smiled and asked, “Would you accept money from my brother instead?” Her husband’s eyebrows furrowed, and he shot a glance towards the picture of her brother, holding a baseball bat with his hair blowing in the wind, taped on the fridge and she knew Michele was wondering if she was about to have another episode.

Maybe they would get to keep the little row house after all.

 

~~~~~~

June 1973

The cigarette was down to its last embers in the ashtray as Mimi stared at the blank piece of white paper in her typewriter. The stack of similar white paper, these ones filled with lines of print, mocked her. There was a cup of coffee that had gone cold on her desk, as well as a bunch of pictures from childhood meant to be scanned, and a couple of tape recorders worn down to their scripts. The artificial lights from the lamp next to her illuminated the few open books she’d gathered from the library, the ones that a _minute_ amount of legitimate sources, but most of them hogwash. The dog, a little corgi named Brigit, was curled up by her feet snoring away, unmindful of the sounds of the television in the t.v. room or Mimi’s husband puttering about in the kitchen.

As they usually did during moments of writer’s block, Mimi’s eyes fell onto the only picture she had of most of her family, from ‘68, before Mama had passed and her oldest nephew, Adam, had gone off to war and never come back. Becca had one arm around her husband, Abraham, and the other around her daughter, Sarah who was only a few years older than her twin grandchildren. Scott and Kimberly were held in their mother’s arms, next to Adam who looked so much like Mimi’s older brother Bucky at that age it had been frightening. All except the blue eyes. Various others were scattered about in rows all over the photograph, Mimi’s own children Jacob and Daphne hanging like barnacles over their grandmother, in her wheelchair in the middle of the picture next to Michele and a frowning Abbi, scolding Lila for something or other. Mimi reached out to trace the two blank spaces in the rows, left there at her mother’s request, for men who still hadn’t come home.

“You’ve been sitting here for three hours,” her husband said placing a fresh cup of hot coffee in front of her, leaning back against the desk to look at her. She sighed, grateful for the excuse to pull her away from her revelry, and grasped the cup of coffee like the lifeline it was. Gabe reached over and pushed some of her russet curls out of her eyes from where they had fallen out of the bun on top of her head.

The bitter flavor of the coffee filled her mouth and she moaned, eyes closing. Her neck was sore and so were her shoulders from sitting bent over the typewriter for weeks since the semester had let out. Not that it was any better when she was grading papers and she’d been working on this book for a few years now, so really, the aching spot under her right shoulder blade was probably never going to go away.

“I’m having second thoughts,” she told him, never one to lie. His eyebrows shot up towards his receding hairline and his mouth opened a little as he stared at her. She continued and said, “Who’s going to read it anyway? All those big wigs that have gotten their books sold think they know everything about Steve already. I read one article last week that _proved_ , or at least it tried to prove, that Steve had been authorized by the military to go into Azzano.”

Even if Mimi hadn’t already known that Steve had led a one-man mission into certain death, she wouldn’t have believed it. Then again, she had the benefit of having known Steve, which none of these historians did. They were working off of half-assed facts from baptism records and military lists. None of them knew that Sarah Rogers had changed her name _after_ she’d arrived in this country and she hadn’t done it officially. They knew even less about her brother. They had no clue that Bucky had been born in Brooklyn, not Illinois, mistaking him for another James Barnes born on the army base her mother and father had been in a few months before, coincidentally with the same name. Mimi wondered sometimes if that man  _had_ actually been named after the president.

“No one else has talked to the Commandos and Peggy Carter. No one else knew Steve and Bucky growing up. You’ll be giving them facts, not speculations,” her husband pointed out. As if she didn’t know it already. Famously, the Howling Commandos had been remarkably tight-lipped about their missions in Europe, speaking only about their lives after the war. Jim Morita spoke about returning home to California and the experiences his family had had interned and James Montgomery had talked mainly about his daughter, Jacqueline, before he’d died in a car crash in ‘72. Jacques Dernier refused any and all interviews, hadn’t even attended the Commando reunion a couple of years before, and was content to farm his land in France. Timothy Dugan was famous for telling people to “fook off if all you want is gossip” and Gabe, well, he refused to talk about anything but Civil Rights and marches for years now. The single interview that Peggy Carter had given a few years after her marriage was the only one that historians could really get any facts from.

“I’m biased,” she told him, “The facts will be skewed. It’s more like I’m writing a biography, not a scholarly work.”

Gabe laughed and took a sip of his own coffee before he said, “And what is so wrong with that? Better than that tripe Harrison Erikson is spewing out. What was his latest one? _Captain America and the Establishment: The Close Companions of War_? We never met anyone in the Establishment and if we ever had, you know damn well Steve would have pissed off the President within ten seconds of meeting him.”

“I make my living as a historian, dear,” she pointed out. She couldn’t very well produce work that she would mark her own students down from.

“And you did all the research that any other historian would do,” he said, taking one of her hands in his and stroking the back of it. “Your closeness to your sources is only an advantage. You even managed to track down Joseph Rogers’ sister.”

“Not that I’m going to be doing anything with that,” she pointed out, lifting her cup up to her lips. The Murdocks, the descendants of Maud Rogers who had changed her name a total of _three_ times before she had married, wanted nothing to do with the media storm that would hail down on them if it was known they were related, however distantly, to Captain America.

Gabe shrugged and joked, “Still more than any of the rest of them did.”

Mimi didn’t know how to tell him that she wasn’t sure if she should tell everything or keep out so much. Her brother had been many things but would he have wanted his personal business, his personal feelings, written down for all the world to see? And the fallout that would occur at even the suggestion that Steve Rogers might have been a little queer sometimes. It’s not like Mimi was erasing Steve’s love for Peggy Carter, she knew how much they’d loved each other and she adored the woman. Becca and her had gotten remarkably close over the years and Peggy could often be seen at the Barnes’ family’s seder table. Yet what kind of scholar would she be if she held back?

She thought of the drawings, Steve’s drawings, that had been found shoved under their mattress after Mama and them had finally been allowed to clear out their rat trap apartment. No one knows, she reminded herself, no one but me and my sisters. Abbi would tell her that it’s better if it remained that way and Becca, well, Becca would shrug and tell her to do whatever she thought was right.

“Fucking hell,” she said, sliding her chair away from her desk. “Why did I decide to do this to myself? Why didn’t you stop me?” Brigit yipped and barked in protest at the loss of her foot-shaped pillow and trotted off, presumably to go curl up with someone in the t.v. room.

Gabe laughed and clutched his stomach. When he finally caught his breath, Mimi scowling at him the entire time, he said, “What good would that have done? You’d have said ‘I’m a grown woman who can make my own decisions, fuck off.’ Just like you do every time.”

Gabe’s motto, ever since they’d first begun writing letters back and forth after the memorial for her brother and Steve, was that he wasn’t messing with any Barnes’ woman when they were on a mission to get what they want. It had been that way all through the time when Mimi had told him she was going to go to university and when she told him she didn’t care what anyone said about them, a couple years after his divorce from Lorraine, if he didn’t and one day they were going to be able to get married. He’d certainly held himself back during the last few years of her mama’s life, when she’d become convinced that she had seen Bucky near his old apartment. Gabe was smart to keep himself away from that argument, the rift between Becca and Abbi had never quite healed after her middle sister’s talk of putting Mama in a home.

“You can face down HYDRA but you can’t face up to your own wife,” she teased, getting up from the chair that she had been sitting in way too long. Her spine cracked as she stretched and she groaned. Gabe pushed himself away from the desk and put his arms around her waist, kissing her softly.

“You’re scarier than any of them,” he answered, his voice taking on a deeper Southern drawl whenever he thought he was being funny. Mimi rolled her eyes and moved away, going to the coffee table to pick up the letter from Dernier addressed to “Madame Barnes” that she had left there. Of course the man had to write to her in French, she thought, looking at the offensive words that had taken her weeks to decipher, refusing her husband’s help.

“When is the deadline?” he asked, as she rooted around looking for where she had left the last letter she had received from Monty before he passed. She bit her lip, finding nothing but t.v. guides, bills, and Jacob’s biology homework.

“Next week,” she said, distractedly, trying to figure out where she could have put the letter. She picked up Daphne’s stuffed Bucky Bear, dressed oddly enough like a ballerina, to look under it and then the couch cushions. It wasn’t like she still needed it, she knew all their letters by heart now, but still, it was her source and if she was going to be taken seriously, she needed that thing.

“Why don’t you take a break for the night then,” he suggested, gathering up her empty coffee cup. Mimi shook her head in refusal. Gabe rolled his eyes. He kissed her on the forehead before he left to go clean up the kitchen and yell at the kids to finish their homework.

Mimi sighed and rubbed her hand over her eyes and then grabbed her pack of cigarettes that she had left lying on the desk. Sitting down again, lit cigarette held between her lips, she stared at the blank sheet of paper. The stack of papers was in an orderly pile, chapter 1, “Steve Rogers’ Precarious Beginnings” on top, covering up chapters 2 through 8. Chapters 10 through 16 were turned diagonally under the beginning chapters. Perhaps I’ll just call it a biography, she thought. There was still no title, she could call it whatever she wanted.

Chapter 9 was scattered, locked up, in the bottom drawer of her desk. She kicked at it with her foot, once, then twice, puffing the smoke into her lungs and blowing it out.

They had kept it from all the Commandos, she reminded herself. Her conscious pricked at her, reminding her that there was nothing really to talk about by then. Was there really not, she thought? Steve’s heart had been big, big enough to love more than one person at a time, and Azzano had been a suicide mission. Peggy had told her this several times, often with a far away look in her eyes. Peggy had known, Mimi thought, she had to have.

But was the world ready to know?

Sighing, she began to type, the words of her preface coming out in short, stuttering bursts while the sounds of the television blended into static noise.

 

_History is about telling a true story or at least what the evidence says is a true story. Much of history is down to interpretation and similar to many disciplines, interpretation can be wrong. Personal experience, growing up with Steve Rogers, the man who would one day become Captain America, does not make one an expert on him. No one but he could know his own mind, after all, and certainly one is not a fly on the wall, buzzing around and tracking his every move. Many of the memories in this book have been altered with time, perspectives skewed by memory. Being the youngest of the Barnes siblings, born ten years after Steve Rogers, I was often on the periphery of my brother and Steve’s lives, hearing about many things second hand. There are many things, in fact, that I simply will never know and was never told. My brother kept a lot of things silent after he moved out and there are many things that not even a close personal relationship with the Howling Commandos, or Peggy Carter, can give one knowledge of._

_I have been working on this for several years now, having chosen not to rely on my own memories. I have tracked down records from churches in New York and Ireland, as well as marriage certificates and death records. Pictures from personal collections have been added as well as ones from newspapers of the times. My own family’s records were the easiest to track down, many of them having been kept by my mother before she passed, and those that weren’t still to be found in our temple’s records. Excluding classified records of my brother from his time in the army then, all of the information on James “Bucky” Barnes will now become public knowledge, for the first time. Furthermore, my marriage to a former Howling Commando, Gabe Jones — a “scandal” that still hasn’t passed (and some will be shocked that his Miriam Barnes is related to Bucky Barnes) for many that refer to his activism or his lectures on biology at Howard University — allows me even more primary source information concerning Steve and Bucky’s time in the army. Whatever I have been told that remains classified has been omitted, however, this book will give life and breath to men that have so far been refused it. Not just Steve Rogers and James Barnes, but their fellow soldiers, Timothy Dugan, James Montgomery, Jim Morita, Jacques Dernier, Gabe Jones, Peggy Carter, as well as scientist Howard Stark, and several others that historians have so far ignored._

_Much of this is secondhand, as well, even though it is primary sources. Debunking the myths that have surrounded Steve Rogers is a hard task and one that not everyone will agree with. The Howling Commandos have been famously silent about their time on the front. The myth surrounding Captain America has turned them from soldiers into heroes. The comic books, that have famously recreated a grown Sergeant James Barnes into a teenage sidekick similar to Batman’s Robin, have almost nothing in common with the real men except that the characters share their names. The radio show from the ‘40s, a rather erroneous recreation of Steve Rogers’ missions in Europe, took a decorated woman such as Peggy Carter and remade her into a damsel-in-distress, Betty Carver, to satisfy American audiences of the decade._

_Since Steve Rogers’ death there has been much speculation as to who he was, from his birth to his childhood to his last days. Three or four different Steve Rogers have been cited as being_ **_the_ ** _Steve Rogers. Given the lack of evidence, and the way in which Captain America has been transformed into the mouthpiece of every political party and business in the country, that most of the information is skewed or wrong comes as no surprise. I have made my living as a professor of history for many years now. Although I am sure there will be backlash, many will say I am seeking attention or spinning false tales, I could no longer keep silent about relevant history. When Watergate occurred, perspectives on the American government, as well as our government’s heroes, changed. Because of this change, I believe it is finally time to let the world know just who Steve Rogers, not Captain America, was._

 

~~~~~~

August 2016

Steve Rogers glared at the prosecutor, Thomas Miller, from where he was sitting. Mimi, old and tired but with still some strength in her, was clutching his left hand as a reminder for him to stay put. No matter that he wanted to rip himself away from this bench and knock out everyone accusing Bucky in this room, how much he wanted to grab him, jump out the window and escape. Go somewhere that no one knew them. The disaster with Stark and the registration act had shown Steve that no matter how much or how far he ran, how hard he fought, they couldn’t escape this.

Especially not after Bucky had turned himself in, still clutching the arc reactor in his metal hand, blank and broken and shaking his head. The only words he had said were “shut up, punk” when Steve tried to wrestle him back, screaming and shouting himself hoarse until there was nothing but ashes and dust in his throat.

He clenched his right fist on his lap when Miller asked, “Do you remember killing Howard and Maria Stark?”

Bucky, his eyes staring off into the distance, a thousand yard stare that showed he was trying to grasp the memory, nodded and said, “He swerved out of the road...to avoid hitting me. He saw my face.”

The reports filed after the car crash in the ‘90s had said that Howard Stark had been dead on impact, his head having collided too hard with the steering wheel. Maria had been thrown from the car, not wearing a seatbelt, and had been found a mangled mess a few feet away. Neither of them had actually _died_ by Bucky’s hands, even if he had personally killed them. That was all HYDRA. Not that Miller cared.

Tony was in the courtroom somewhere, though Steve couldn’t see him. He’d recovered from the incident, and they hadn’t spoken since. Steve didn’t know what to say to him, his friend that he had fought, the one that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, seem to listen to him. Steve understood his grief, his anger, but he wouldn’t stand for it being directed at Bucky. Natasha was somewhere here too, probably dyed and disguised, and who knew whose side of the room she was on. She’d surprised him, in the end, like she often did, driving up with a getaway car that Bucky had refused. Clint was still in the hospital and Sam was next to him. The defendant’s side was filled with a whole slew of Barnes’, though only two of them still had the name, and descendants of the Commandos, including ten year old Hana, Jim’s grandson Harry and Becca’s daughter Sarah’s child. Sharon Carter was sitting behind him, moral support since Peggy couldn’t be here herself, for the men who had been her great aunt’s friends.

A click indicated that the picture of the Stark wreck on the projector had changed. The new picture was of another wreck, this one of an older model car, on a street in London. Behind him, Steve heard Rikki Barnes let out a “what the fuck” at the image he recognized of Monty’s death. Mimi stroked circles over his arm and next to her, Dernier, the only one of the Howling Commandos still alive, muttered “ _calmez-vous._ ” Even Bucky looked visibly startled at the sight, face shifting quizzically.

“What about James Montgomery?” the rat of a prosecutor asked. Steve darkly pictured ripping out his spine and handing it to him for suggesting that Bucky had a hand in Monty’s death. Not all of HYDRA’s dirty work had been done by the Winter Soldier’s hands, the Red Room a testament to that fact.

Bucky stared him down, causing the man to shift nervously, even though guards around them were holding rifles and he was handcuffed with enforced restraints.

In an even tone that spoke of how much Bucky was restraining himself from calling the man a putz he answered, “I did not kill Monty.”

The trial had been going on for weeks. Every day felt like a knife underneath Steve’s skin. Everytime he saw Bucky, handcuffed and restrained like an animal, like a machine, he felt the rage he’d been barely caging in bubble up, threatening to erupt again. Only his name, Captain America, had gotten him away from his own trial, even after his violent reaction to the registration act. The whole trial was a farce. Every bit of information that the prosecution had brought in, to scapegoat the man who had been HYDRA’s victim for seventy years so that they didn’t have to look to closely at their own culpability, was twisted. The deaths at the Winter Soldier’s hands painted as willingly done. They’d even dragged up old information from their childhoods, like the time that Bucky had been arrested for fighting with a man behind a bar in DUMBO, nevermind that Steve had been too.

Every “fact” was countered by Bucky’s own lawyer, Matt Murdock, a friend of Natasha’s, but the signs and protests outside spoke of the tense air. Twitter and tumblr and facebook had blown up with those on the side of Bucky’s guilt or innocence and Fox News was spewing out vitriol about stripping _both_ of them of their medals and rank. Steve couldn’t even turn on the radio anymore without the urge to hurl it out his window. Murdock had called all of Bucky’s family to the stand, as well as those who’d worked for HYDRA and were party to the Winter Soldier project. He’d called Sam and Wanda and even the Wakandan prince who’d been chasing them, to speak on Bucky’s behalf. Some of the mood had shifted, especially when Murdock had brought in neurological scans that spoke of the damage Bucky’s brain had undergone for decades from the effects of the machine, as well as the early conditioning attempts. The torture, the beatings, the starvation, and isolation. Every image caused people’s faces to pale, some to run out of the room, others to shake their heads.

Every image felt like a knife to Steve’s gut. You could have stopped this, he thought, covering Mimi’s eyes so she wouldn’t have to see. If he’d only stopped and thought about it for a second, recognized the signs. The darkness in Bucky’s eyes, the way he healed, faster than he ever had. The speed with which he’d kept up with Steve on their way out of Azzano, despite being tortured for days. The way he no longer seemed to get drunk no matter how much he drank. The nightmares and the track marks in his elbows. Steve had been blind, willfully blind, too caught up in the fact that Bucky was there, safe and sound and at his side, that he’d blocked it out. Had left him in that ravine to be dragged to hell.

The mood darkened and shifted around him as Miller clicked again. An older woman, brown curls drenched with blood from the gunshot wound to her forehead, familiar blue eyes staring at nothing. Next to him, Mimi gasped and whimpered. This time it took both Dernier and Sam, as well as Bucky’s nephew Jacob Barnes and great-nephew Trip, to keep him in his seat. Bucky’s face was pale, paler than he’d ever seen him; like a ghost. He stared at the picture with grief and horror, eyes glassy.

“Did you kill Rebecca Hoffman, member of S.H.I.E.L.D?” Miller asked, with a disturbingly robotic look on his face. Murdock and his partner Foggy Nelson shifted in their seats.

Bucky’s whole body shuddered as he took in a deep breath, one, then two, then three. Steve matched him, trying to keep his breathing even, his heart pounding in a machine-gun rhythm with all of the urges he was suppressing, all of the words he couldn’t say. Bucky swallowed, hard, his adam’s apple jumping in his throat and answered, “No.”

The prosecutor stared at him like he was a bug underneath a microscope and if Steve could, he’d be using the man’s head as a baseball. Still shifting underneath the force of Bucky’s gaze, or maybe he could feel Steve’s own glare against his back, the man said, “That is the shot of an expert sniper. You, an expert sniper, did not kill Rebecca Hoffman?”

Bucky’s face shifted for a second, containing a snarl, before it smoothed out as he answered, “HYDRA had a lot of snipers.”

The prosecutor nodded and said, “Yet they would have thought it poetic, no, for a brother to kill his enemy sister?”

Sam was practically sitting in his lap now in his effort to keep Steve from leaping over all the benches and drop kicking the prosecutor. His friend muttered in his ear, “Would you stop it? Goddammit Steve, you’re going to get your ass thrown in jail and what good is that going to do?” The courtroom was a mess of whispers and motion, the guards standing ready with their fingers on their triggers. Some of them, Steve noticed, were looking at him.

No one had really forgotten that Steve had nearly destroyed an entire government trying to protect Bucky Barnes.

“Objection,” Murdock said, standing up, his voice smooth and even, “That is pure speculation.” The judge, with pursed lips, sustained it.

Miller backed up a few feet, seemingly not willing to stand anywhere near Bucky, but then shifted over closer to the prosecutor’s side. The clicker shaking in his hands a bit, he said, “No further questions, your honor.”

He had already exhausted his slide show. Twenty-eight victims, two of them false. That were known. HYDRA, back when it was Leviathan in Zola’s hands, hadn’t kept extensive records about their _kills_.

The judge motioned that they were going to break for a recess and the room began to empty, people filing out of the uncomfortable air. Steve shook Sam off and moved to talk to Murdock. He caught Bucky’s eyes as he was led away, blue and lost and devastated and he wanted to reach out and hold him like Bucky used to do for him when they were young.

“I want to testify,” he said, voice hard and tight. Murdock stared, well not stared, but it certainly seemed like the blind man knew exactly where he was, at him. “I need to testify.”

Bucky had told him no. Said he was too biased and that he was going to get his punk ass thrown in jail. Sam had agreed with him and so had Lila Capello, his niece, a lawyer who refused to defend her uncle because she was too close to the situation. Murdock had nodded along with them, but Steve didn’t care. If the world was going to condemn Bucky, he wasn’t going to let him stand alone.

He spotted Natasha in the back of the room, feet propped up on the bench in front of her, smirking at him over her phone. She was sitting a few rows behind Sharon. He stared at her and she nodded at him.

“Are you sure? They are going to twist things you say. Especially given the recent...revelations,” Murdock said, his tone placid, almost like he was bored, though Steve knew for a fact that the man was giving this trial his all.

“I would have done the same for Peggy,” he said, knowing that the revelations Matt was talking about _wasn’t_ Steve’s rebellion but rather his confession that he loved Bucky. The media had had a field day with that, many of them wondering whether that meant that Peggy Carter had been a beard — which made him want to tear out _their_ hair because how dare they suggest that — and a few historians pumping fists in the air. Rikki had told him that if he wasn’t currently persona no grata #1 then he would have been contacted by several LGBT rights groups by now.

Peggy, if she’d been alive to see it (and that still made Steve choke up thinking about all of the years he’d missed with her), would have laughed at the fallout and told him that he never could learn to keep his mouth shut.

“I’m sure,” he said. He stood at attention, shoulders squared, jaw pushed forward and muscles clenched.

 

“I had them on the ropes,” Bucky whispered in his ear later on, a few days later, after the not guilty had been announced and the world had turned into a hurricane. Grasping him in his arms, Steve’s face buried in his long hair, he shook with silent tears full of relief and laughter and grief. Bucky’s eyes were glassy when he pulled away, smiling, to kiss him in front of his entire family that he had yet to properly meet. Scott, his drunk of a great-nephew, slammed his foot into the bench out of shock and his sister Kimberly had cheered.

Steve kissed him back, hearing the click and flashing of cameras and whispers behind them. He pulled away, lips trembling, and said, “Sure you did, jerk.”

Mimi, never one to miss an opportunity, catcalled and said, “You two better get married before I’m dead, do you hear? I mean it, Bucky, I want to see it!”

Her voice was thin and hoarse but hearing those words Steve felt like he was sixteen again, watching her say that she needed to see her brother’s baseball games. Bucky huffed and laughed and let go of Steve to clutch his sister, folding himself in half around her frail body.

Kissing her on the cheek, he pulled away after a few minutes and grinned, before he said, “Who says I’ll have him?”

Steve stared at him, indignant, and moved forward to grab his right hand. Rolling his arm he said, “Who says I want you anyway?”

Everyone stared at him in disbelief. Which was fair.

Bucky kissed him again and this time it was slower, a whisper of a promise from long ago. Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out the dog tags he’d _retrieved_ from the Smithsonian.

Looping it around Bucky neck, the golden chain brushed against the flesh of Bucky’s collarbone and chest, he smirked and said, “Well, Ma always told me as long as I didn’t marry any Protestant.”

Bucky rolled his eyes and said, “Your Ma also used to say you needed to throw salt over your shoulder to keep away the devil, Steve.”

Steve kissed him, rough this time, and pulled back to say, “Shut up jerk and marry me already.”

Bucky’s eyebrow shot up and although his eyes were still lost and sad there was a sparkle there, the same one that he’d had when they were boys and marrying would have been impossible. Abbi, if she’d been here, probably would have said this was too fast, especially since he’d just gotten Bucky back and their relationship had been in the past even before he’d volunteered for the serum. Still, Steve thought, Peggy would have approved.

“Of course I’m going to marry you,” Bucky said, putting his head down to rest on Steve’s shoulder. They stood there for several minutes, their family and friends shuffling out, as the sun began to set.

**Author's Note:**

> I choose to make Mimi a historian because I felt like it fit to explain some discrepancies when it came to Bucky Barnes in the Smithsonian. I also wanted to make the Barnes family and the Rogers family more human, people with their own personalities and flaws and I hoped I succeeded.
> 
> Il Mio Dio (Italian) - Oh My God.
> 
> As ucht Dé - For God’s sake.
> 
> Carissima (Italian) - Dearest
> 
> mămăliga -type of cornmeal dish, Romanian.
> 
> Song that Bucky sings to to Sarah Rogers is from a 1934 Yiddish musical comedy called Eyns un a rekhts.
> 
> I had a whole family tree planned out. Sarah Roger’s original name in this fic ended up being Saoirse Ó Ciardha. Matt Murdock is related to the Rogers by descent of Sarah’s sister in law, Maud, in this fic. I might write more exploring that family at some point.
> 
> vaffanculo - fuck you (Italian)
> 
> Stai bene? - Are you okay? (Italian)
> 
> carciofi alla giudìa - fried artichokes. Italian.
> 
> Dolcezza - Italian endearment similar to sweetheart.
> 
> principessa - Princess
> 
> Cara mia, che cos’hai - My dear, what is wrong? (Italian)
> 
> Căcat - shit (Romanian)
> 
> My tumblr: [here](http://the-river-of-truth.tumblr.com/)


End file.
